1. Field
The following description relates to an apparatus and method for traversing a hierarchical acceleration structure in ray tracing.
2. Description of the Related Art
A ray tracing method is a method of creating an image by tracing a path of light incident along a ray toward each pixel of an image from a camera viewpoint.
The ray tracing method reflects physical properties of light, such as reflection, refraction, and penetration, for example, in the rendering result, and thus, may create a high quality image.
The ray tracing method is widely used in three-dimensional (3D) rendering fields of movies and animations in which rendering is performed for a more realistic scene.
Compared to a rasterization method of creating an image while projecting a 3D object onto a screen, a calculation process of the ray tracing method is relatively complex and slow, and thus, has been regarded as a non-real-time rendering method. However, with the development in hardware and through research on a hierarchical data structure for accelerating an intersection calculation, a real-time ray tracing method has been enabled.